At least they didn't drive a bulldozer over him!

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Jews sans frontieres: Israel denies Finkelstein the right of return

Norman Finkelstein has been arrested and is being held in an Israeli jail pending his deportation and a probable ten year ban.
If Israel can deny someone entry on security grounds because of what they write or say, any state signed up for the ludicrous war on terror can do it. You see whilst honest people recognise in Israel a particularly repugnant ideology at work, the western states that back Israel all the way like to pretend that Israel is "normal" by their standards. Of course that's just not true but that is the claim that is made for these war criminals. Remember the Abu Ghraib torture business? Remember how one of the lawyers for one (or more?) of the torturers said, straight faced, that these are Israeli techniques? If Israel is a role model then what's to stop other western states banning people on account of their criticism of the racist war criminals of Israel, their apologists in governments, "opposition", the media, and Israel's fundraisers?


The Good Old Days

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Peter Riddell: Never mind the numbers, it’s the mood swing that reveals the true picture
In many ways, what we saw yesterday was a return to normal: a governing party losing out to the main opposition party — just as happened when Labour was last in power in the Sixties and Seventies. From 1966 to 1970, the Tories gained as many as twelve seats from Labour, and other parties captured two... In the 1966-70 parliament, the swings varied enormously, from 8.5 to 21.2 per cent. Even on the same day, in March 1968, when the Tories won three seats from Labour (Acton, Dudley and Meriden), the swings varied between 15.1 and 21.2 per cent.
Peter Riddell has been around for a long time, maybe too long. What happened forty years ago has absolutely no relevance to the present political scene and you'd have to be at least 63 now to have voted back in 1966. Labour and Conservative weren't even the same political parties back then (except for the names of course), and the same goes for the Lib-Dems, come to that.

There is a deep resentment of New Labour and it goes well beyond the fairly recent economic problems. It predates Brown but is coming to a head precisely because many people see that Brown was nothing more than a continuation of Blair, despite the rhetoric. In many ways Brown is worse than Blair. In the end we all knew that Blair had no real beliefs, beyond self-advancement. But Brown actually believes in what he's doing and that, I'm afraid,  will be his downfall. He believes. The rest of us don't. End of story.


Don't stop now

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Abortion in Britain: the debate ain’t over yet
Ann Furedi:
For those of us who have watched the debates evolve over the decades, it was interesting to see how the limits of the discussion have shifted. In 1990, the best of the pro-choice placards and posters demanded that abortion should be available ‘as early as possible, as late as necessary’, suggesting that women’s need for abortion should be met irrespective of fetal viability (a principle that was adopted for women whose pregnancies were affected by a serious risk of severe abnormality). At the other end of the spectrum, the anti-abortion lobby argued that abortion was murder and should not be tolerated by civilised society.


Where's that rope?

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'Cold, pathetic coward' who killed and killed again gets 20 years

This man stabbed someone to death in 1996 and was released from prison on licence six years later. He was recalled after committing a minor crime and served another three years during which time he became a heroin addict ! On November 8th 2006, desperate for money for drugs, he slashed to death Amjid Ismail, a learning impaired 34 year old who was minding his family's village store.

Meanwhile Ronnie Biggs remains in prison, at the age of 79, for a relatively minor role in a robbery in 1963. I give up.

A women who never needed to worry about abortion in any case

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Ann Widdicombe sits next to Nadine Dorries as she speaks in support of lowering the abortion time limit, nodding and gurning hideously as Mad Nad describes the horrors of abortion. Mind you, Widdicome would probably be pulling horrified looks if Nad was simply describing some of her sexual adventures, given that Widdicome has never so much as seen a man in the nude, let alone had sex, or got pregnant. Silly cow.